Authors: Martin Gilbert
With nightfall, the train was scarcely two hours away from the German border. ‘It was a dreary, raw and cold November evening,’ Bretholz recalled. ‘My body was shivering, my mouth was dry, my cheeks felt feverish.’ He was also afraid. His account continued:
We chose the moment of escape very carefully. It had to come at a time when the train would slow down for a curve. It also had to be timed correctly to avoid the floodlights which the guards were aiming over the entire length of the concave curvature of the train during the period of reduced speed.
At the propitious moment we bent the bars into the spread-apart position. I lifted myself, rump first, out of the opening, holding on to the ledge above it on the outside. The rest of my body followed. My right leg, testingly, reached around the corner for the coupling which joined our car with the next. I found it and was safely standing on it holding on to one of the rungs of the iron steps leading to the roof of the car.
My friend followed, using the same method. The train, at
that point, was going full speed as the two of us were standing on the couplings between cars. Something had held up our friend who was part of the escape plan, for it took him some time to lift himself on to the opening. As he appeared to have reached the outside, the train went into a slight curve, slowing down as we had expected.
At this split second, we had to take our chances and leap before the beams of the floodlights would fall upon us. We jumped. We tumbled into a ravine and held our breath for what seemed like an eternity. Our friend never joined us. He must have been frightened or he had been caught in the glare of the lights and discovered.
The train continued on its way to Birkenau. On arrival, 145 men and 82 women were selected for the barracks and forced labour. The remaining 771 were gassed. Of those who had been selected to ‘live’, only four survived the war.
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On November 9 it was the turn of Greek-born Jews, arrested in Paris four days earlier, to be deported to Birkenau. Among them were several hundred Sephardi Jews from Salonica, and their children, most of them born in France. One of these children, Salvator Cabili, was eight months old.
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A further 113 Greek-born Jews were among the 745 deportees on November 11, together with 35 patients from the Rothschild Old Age Home in Paris. Six of these patients were over eighty years old.
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On arrival at Birkenau, at night, the women, the children, the old and the sick, were lined up to be marched to the gas-chamber. The young Slovak Jew, Rudolf Vrba, who had already been in the barracks at Birkenau for several months, later recalled the arrival of this latest transport from France:
For the SS this was an easy load. These people knew nothing of ghettos or pogroms. They had never had their senses toughened by real persecution. They were docile to the point of apathy, in fact, and they did precisely what they were told without a murmur of protest, an utterly amenable mass of human putty in the hands of experienced artists.
Yet these were the people who nearly made the SS panic.
It happened at midnight in the cold winter of 1942. Men, women and children were queuing obediently for selection when something went wrong.
Every night a truck, carrying a harvest of dead from Auschwitz to Birkenau, passed at right angles to the head of the ramp. Normally nobody saw what it held and it was gone before anyone could even think about it; but that night it was overloaded. That night it was swaying and heaving with the weight of dead flesh and, as it crawled over the railway lines, it began to bounce and buck on its tired, tortured springs.
The neatly packed bodies began to shift. A hundred, two hundred scrawny arms and legs flopped over the side, waving wildly, limply in a terrible, mocking farewell; and simultaneously from those three thousand men, women and children, rose a thin, hopeless wail that swept from one end of the orderly queue to the other, an almost inhuman cry of despair that neither threats, nor blows, nor bullets could silence.
With one, last desperate lurch, the lorry cleared the tracks, disappearing out of the arclights, into the darkness; and then there was silence, absolute and all-embracing. For three seconds, four at the most, those French people had glimpsed the true horror of Auschwitz; but now it was gone and they could not believe what their eyes had told them. Already their minds, untrained to mass murder, had rejected the existence of that lorry; and with that they marched quietly towards the gas-chambers which claimed them half an hour later.
Yet the SS realised well what could happen if mass hysteria of this nature had time to catch hold of their victims, if the lorry broke down, for instance. Every night after that, a secret signal was given when it was approaching and all arclights were switched off until it was safely out of sight.
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One more camp with selection and gas-chambers was about to begin operation: Majdanek, on the eastern outskirts of Lublin. As at Birkenau, a percentage of the able-bodied deportees were sent to the barracks, to toil, torture and tyranny. The young, the elderly and the sick were gassed. On November 9, four thousand Lublin Jews, who had already been deported, first in March to a camp at Majdan Tatarski, and then, in September, to another camp at Piaski, were brought to Majdanek.
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Yet another name had entered the vocabulary of evil.
As at Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, and as in Birkenau,
the scenes at Majdanek had few, if any, parallels in the catalogue of human crime. ‘It was a Sunday,’ Janina Latowicz later recalled. ‘A lorry was brought into the camp. A woman guard and a young SS man went into the children’s hut and began dragging them out. They had whips. The children were whipped towards the lorry. They were thrown into the air. Many were flung against the lorry and the side of the huts, their heads were smashed open. They were piled into the lorry like filth.’ The mothers screamed. Callously, the woman guard asked the mothers why they were making such a fuss. ‘The children are going to the rose garden,’ she said.
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The rose garden was the gas-chamber, five minutes’ drive away.
In Oslo, on November 11, while the deportation of several hundred Jews was being prepared, the Norwegian Protestant bishops issued a public protest: ‘God does not differentiate between peoples,’ they declared, and went on to oppose all laws ‘in conflict with the Christian faith’. That month, 531 Norwegian Jews, men, women and children, were deported to Birkenau.
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More Norwegian Jews were saved than were deported. Among those who were saved was Henriette Samuel, the wife of the already deported Chief Rabbi. Her children were saved with her. A twenty-five-year-old Norwegian girl, Inge Sletten, a member of the Norwegian resistance, not only warned Henriette Samuel of the impending deportation, but then took her and her children for safety to the home of a Christian friend, brought them food and clothing, and, a week later, arranged for them to be smuggled across the border into neutral Sweden, together with forty other Jews.
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In all, 930 Norwegian Jews were saved in this way.
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One form of resistance which had begun in Nazi-occupied Poland concerned the protection of those in hiding. In the woods around the town of Siemiatycze in the Bialystok region, Jews who had managed to escape the November deportation to Treblinka organized a small group, five in number, found other fugitives to join them, and tried to protect those Jews who were in hiding. Under the leadership of Hershl Shabbes, and in its early days with a single rifle, the Siemiatycze group, as it became known, threatened to shoot any Poles who betrayed Jews to the Gestapo.
This was no idle threat. In December 1942 a Polish peasant captured three Jews, among them Motl Bluestein, tied them up, and handed them over to the Gestapo in Drohiczyn, where they were tortured and shot. As a warning to others, the Siemiatycze group murdered not only the peasant, but his family.
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In mid-November the remaining Jews of Zwierzyniec were deported to Belzec. They were forced to take off all their clothes before boarding the train, in order to make escapes more difficult. ‘But they tried just the same,’ Stanislaw Bohdanowicz later recalled. ‘Along the railway line, everywhere one could see the naked corpses of shot people.’ Once, at Zwierzyniec railway station, Bohdanowicz saw ‘a young, nude Jewess who had only been wounded. The railway police caught her, and took her to the Jewish cemetery, where she was shot.’
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Inside Belzec, there was no escape: on November 15 Rudolf Reder was a witness to the arrival of a train from the city of Zamosc:
It was cold. The ground was covered with snow and mud. In such conditions and in the middle of a snow storm, a big transport arrived from Zamosc. The whole Judenrat was on the train. When they had all undressed and stood naked, as usual, the men were pushed towards the gas-chambers and the women to the barrack-hut to have their heads shaved. But the leader of the Judenrat was ordered to stay behind in the yard. The Ukrainian guards took the transport away and the complete Belzec SS detachment surrounded the Jewish leader. I don’t know his name. I saw a middle-aged man, pale as death, but completely calm.
The SS men ordered the orchestra in the yard to await further orders. The orchestra—six musicians—was usually stationed in the area between the gas-chambers and the mass graves. They played all the time—day after day—using instruments taken from the dead.
I was working nearby on construction work, and saw everything that happened. The SS ordered the orchestra to play ‘Es geht alles voruber, es geht alles vorbei’ and ‘Drei Lilien’ on flutes, fiddles and harmonicas. This lasted for some time. Then they put the leader of the Judenrat against a wall and started to beat him about the head and face with whips. Those who
tortured him were Irrmann—a fat Gestapo man—Schwartz, Schmidt and some of the Ukrainian guards.
Their victim was ordered to dance and jump around to the music while being beaten. After some hours he was given a quarter of a loaf of bread and made to eat it—while still being beaten.
He stood there, covered in blood, indifferent, very calm. I did not hear him even groan once. His torment lasted for seven hours. The SS men stood there and laughed, ‘Das ist eine hohere Person, Prasident des Judenrates!’ They shouted loudly and wickedly.
It was six o’clock in the evening when Gestapo man Schmidt pushed him towards a grave, shot him in the head and kicked the body on to the pile of gassed victims.
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On a subsequent train reaching Belzec, the SS had to leave a hundred people out of the gas-chamber, having calculated that even the able-bodied Jews of the Sonderkommando would not be able to handle such large numbers. The hundred not gassed were all young boys. Rudolf Reder later recalled:
All day long they were employed dragging corpses to the mass graves and were constantly beaten with whips. They were not given a drop of water to drink—and worked naked in the snow and mud. In the evening, Schmidt took them to the mass graves and shot them with his Browning automatic. As he was short of ammunition, he used his pistol butt to batter some of them to death. I didn’t hear a sound from any of them. I only saw them jostling with each other to be the next in line in that death queue—the defenceless remnants of life and youth!
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In Cracow, a Jewish couple who had not yet been deported, Moses and Helen Hiller, decided that whereas, as a young couple, they might possibly survive deportation to what they believed would be a labour camp, their two-year-old son Shachne would surely perish. They had already made contact with two Catholics, Josef Jachowicz and his wife, in nearby Dabrowa, and on November 15 Helen Hiller managed to leave the ghetto with her son, and to reach the Jachowicz home.
Helen Hiller gave her son to the Catholic couple. She also gave them two envelopes. One contained all the Hillers’ precious valuables; the other, letters and a will. One of the letters entrusted Mr and Mrs Jachowicz with Shachne, and asked them to ‘return him to his people’ in the event of his parents’ death. A second letter was addressed to Shachne himself, telling him how much his parents loved him, and that it was this love which had prompted them to leave him alone with strangers, ‘good and noble people’.
This second letter told Shachne of his Jewishness and expressed the hope that he would grow up to be a man ‘proud of his Jewish heritage’.
A third letter contained a will written by Helen Hiller’s mother, addressed to her sister-in-law in the United States, in which she asked her sister-in-law to take the child to her home in Washington should none of the family in Poland survive, and to reward Josef Jachowicz and his wife—the ‘good people’, as she described them.
As Helen Hiller handed the three letters to Mrs Jachowicz, she pleaded: ‘If I or my husband do not return when this madness is over, please post this letter to America to our relatives. They will surely respond and take the child. Regardless of the fate of my husband or myself, I want my son brought up as a Jew.’
Mrs Jachowicz promised that she would fulfil the requests. The two women embraced, and Helen Hiller returned to Cracow. She was never to see her son again.
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***
The deportations within German-occupied Poland were almost over: 600,000 Polish Jews had been gassed in Belzec, 360,000 in Chelmno, 250,000 in Sobibor. Treblinka, where 840,000 were gassed, still awaited the German decision about the surviving 50,000 Jews of Warsaw.
Now it was in the forests and labour camps that the killings began. Throughout the winter, Polish peasants took part in raids organized by the Germans to track down Jews in hiding. ‘The peasants,’ noted Zygmunt Klukowski in his diary on November 26, ‘for fear of repressive measures, catch Jews in the villages and bring them into the town, or sometimes simply kill them on the spot.’ Klukowski added: ‘Generally, a strange brutalization has taken place regarding the Jews. People have fallen into a kind of psychosis:
following the German example, they often do not see in the Jew a human being but instead consider him as a kind of obnoxious animal that must be annihilated with every possible means, like rabid dogs, rats, etc.’
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